Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Last week I finally finished my bit of "experimental scholarship" on the question of evaluating intelligence. One of the tools one of our amazing work study students (Thanks, Aleksandra!) built to help me with the analysis was a wiki with all of the individual statements from the three documents (One NIE and two ICAs) on individual pages. We then used the wiki to help sort through the various estimative statements.

I have decided to make the wiki public so that other students, academics and intel professionals can make use of it if they wish (I will have some specific examples of classroom activities at the end of the post).

To access the wiki you can click on the links above or the picture below. You should get a page that looks something like the picture below.

The three links in the main frame of the wiki go to the three documents used in my study. The big blue button in the main frame (labelled "2002 NIE Estimative Statements") links to all of the estimative statements in the three documents. When you click on it, you should get a page that looks something like the one below:

Clicking on any one of these links takes you to a page (like the one below) where you can make your case for or against the estimative statement. You can also just comment if you like.

You can add your comment or analysis by clicking on the Discussion tab (circled in red). This should take you to a page that looks something like the one below:

Note the space for your comment (indicated by the red arrow). You can also click on and see previous comments by others (note the links in the red circle).

This could serve as an excellent classroom exercise in evaluating intelligence. I could imagine students given several of the statements to research with the assignment to post their answers to the wiki. This way, they could see what others have to say and the after action discussion could serve as a stepping off point on the broader question of evaluating intelligence. It is also an easy and useful introduction to wiki technology.

1 comment:

Marvelous inventive use for the wiki. I have been using wikispaces, since your first mention, for my major estimative research project project and recently expanded its use as the deliverable for a topical research paper and presentation. Students adapt to it instantly and love to see the progress classmates are making on their projects since each student has an individual page on the same wiki. With your insight, having them use the discussion page to evaluate/comment on their peer's "works in progress" would add a whole other dimension to their work. - Tom Algoe Hilbert College